Social Norms,Environmental Regulations And Disposal Of Pesticide Packaging Waste

The agricultural ecological environment provides an important resource guarantee for social development.At present,China has not fundamentally changed its extensive agriculture farming system,and the contradiction between production and governance is still prominent,so there is a long way to go in agricultural non-point source pollution control.The dispersion,concealment,and lagging characteristics of agricultural pollution determine that the current point source control policy is imperfect,and environmental protection needs more public participation.Farmers are the first actors in agricultural production and direct beneficiaries of agricultural ecological environment improvement.Only by raising farmers’ subject consciousness can we solve the problem of agricultural non-point source pollution at the source.Pesticides are an important guarantee of stable and increased agricultural production.However,with the expansion of the use and the accumulation of time,the randomly discarded pesticide packaging waste(PPW)damages the agricultural ecological environment and restricts the green development of agriculture.To this end,the state formulated relevant documents emphasizing the promotion of agricultural input packaging waste recycling.However,the large quantity and wide distribution of PPW make it more difficult for the government to supervise;the contradiction between policy design without sufficient consideration and farmers’ rational behavioral choices leads to ineffective restraint.To a certain extent,the informal system represented by social norms makes up for the lack of regulation of the formal system.It is important to study the mechanism of social norms and environmental regulation on the behavior of PPW disposal to explore the long-term mechanism of PPW disposal and achieve high-quality agricultural development.Based on 547 rural household data in Jiangxi Province,this paper uses Ordered Logit,2SLS,and moderating effect models to analyze the mechanism of action between social norms and rural households’ PPW disposal behavior,considers the differences in effects on farmers with different characteristics,and then tests the moderating effect of environmental regulation in the path of influence between social norms and rural households’ PPW disposal behavior.The results show that(1)descriptive norms and directive norms can promote farmers not to litter PPW,but the role of directive norms(surrounding crowd supervision)is more obvious than descriptive norms(the behavior of the surrounding crowd).Consistent conclusions were still obtained after the robustness test and endogeneity treatment.(2)The results of heterogeneity analysis showed that the descriptive norms are more significant in promoting small-scale rural households and old farmers not to litter PPW;the directive norms are more significant in promoting large-scale households not to litter PPW.(3)The results of the moderating effect test show that reputation incentives strengthen the promotion effect of directive norms on farmers’ behavior of not littering PPW;punishment regulation hinders the promotion effect of descriptive norms on farmers’ behavior of not littering PPW.Finally,based on the research findings,the following policy recommendations are proposed: continuously strengthen the guidance and soft binding force of informal institutions such as social norms;accurately locate target groups and develop differentiation measures;pay attention to the complementarity of formal and informal institutions,and reasonably formulate environmental regulations to fit with social norms.